Headquarters: Carrington, North Dakota
Founded: 1991
Revenues: Undisclosed
Employees: 500
Web site: www.dakotagrowers.com
What it does: Manufactures dry pasta for retail and food-service markets in North America and beyond



It was 1991, and Jack Dalrymple was worried. He was a director of the U.S. Durum Growers Association, nearly all of whose members were North Dakota farmers. Durum, the hardest of all wheats, is used almost exclusively for pasta. At the time, 80 percent of U.S. durum production was in North Dakota. But a new free-trade agreement was going to give Canadian durum growers more open access to the U.S. market. What’s more, a new farm bill was not expected to provide financial relief to North Dakota producers, and durum prices were tumbling.

The association board agreed that its future would be bleak unless it took a bold step: forming a cooperative corporation and producing its own dry pasta. Dalrymple was appointed chairman of the organizing board for the facility.

It’s not as though Dalrymple’s plate had room for a heaping helping of macaroni. He had been running his family’s farm in Casselton for 20 years; he was also serving in the North Dakota House of Representatives. Still, Dalrymple led the search for a plant manager and a lead lender, and made presentations to 26 different groups of North Dakota grain producers to raise money. In November 1993, the cooperative opened its integrated durum mill and pasta plant in Carrington, North Dakota.

That was just the beginning. Four years later, the cooperative, called Dakota Growers Pasta Company, purchased Minneapolis-based pasta manufacturer Primo Piatto. The acquisition doubled Dakota Growers’ capacity and boosted its share of the retail private-label market. “We are now the third-largest dry pasta manufacturer—and are number one in nonbranded pasta—in North America,” Dalrymple says. The company now grinds 12 million bushels of durum per year and produces nearly 500 million pounds of pasta in several shapes.

In 2002, Dalrymple oversaw the effort to convert Dakota Growers Pasta from a cooperative to a C-corporation. “First, we wanted to improve liquidity for shareholders,” he says. “Second, we wanted to be ready for any strategic opportunities that might come along, and a C-corporation is the only way that you can talk business with other potential strategic partners. Third, many of our original shareholders were no longer raising durum and were no longer supplying durum to the cooperative.”

The next year, with the low-carb craze whacking the macaroni market, Dalrymple directed the development of Dreamfields, a pasta product with 5 grams of carbohydrate per serving (versus a typical 38), with more fiber than regular pasta, and with half the calories. The craze was petering out as Dreamfields was released, so the product was repositioned for the weight-reduction and diabetes categories.

“I never realized how much you could squeeze out of a day,” says Dalrymple, who’s now North Dakota’s lieutenant governor as well as chairman of Dakota Growers Pasta. “A lot of this is made possible by new technologies; I never could have done it before cell phones, laptop computers, and being able to communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. I sometimes talk to public officials from a pickup truck or from my tractor 300 miles away. You make it work, but the days are long.”